Earl Hines

Once called "the first modern jazz pianist," Earl Hines differed from the stride pianists of the 1920s by breaking up the stride rhythms with unusual accents from his left hand. While his right hand often played octaves so as to ring clearly over ensembles, Hines had the trickiest left hand in the business, often suspending time recklessly but without ever losing the beat. One of the all-time great pianists, Hines was a major influence on Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy, Joe Sullivan, Nat King Cole, and even to an extent on Art Tatum. He was also an underrated composer responsible for "Rosetta," "My Monday Date," and "You Can Depend on Me," among others.

Earl Hines played trumpet briefly as a youth before switching to piano. His first major job was accompanying vocalist Lois Deppe, and he made his first recordings with Deppe and his orchestra in 1922. The following year, Hines moved to Chicago where he worked with Sammy Stewart and Erskine Tate's Vendome Theatre Orchestra. He started teaming up with Louis Armstrong in 1926, and the two masterful musicians consistently inspired each other. Hines worked briefly in Armstrong's big band (formerly headed by Carroll Dickerson), and they unsuccessfully tried to manage their own club. 1928 was one of Hines' most significant years. He recorded his first ten piano solos, including versions of "A Monday Date," "Blues in Thirds," and "57 Varieties." Hines worked much of the year with Jimmy Noone's Apex Club Orchestra, and their recordings are also considered classic. Hines cut brilliant (and futuristic) sides with Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, resulting in such timeless gems as "West End Blues," "Fireworks," "Basin Street Blues," and their remarkable trumpet-piano duet "Weather Bird." And on his birthday on December 28, Hines debuted with his big band at Chicago's Grand Terrace.

A brilliant ensemble player as well as soloist, Earl Hines would lead big bands for the next 20 years. Among the key players in his band through the 1930s would be trumpeter/vocalist Walter Fuller, Ray Nance on trumpet and violin (prior to joining Duke Ellington), trombonist Trummy Young, tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, Omer Simeon and Darnell Howard on reeds, and arranger Jimmy Mundy. In 1940, Billy Eckstine became the band's popular singer, and in 1943 (unfortunately during the musicians' recording strike), Hines welcomed such modernists as Charlie Parker (on tenor), trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and singer Sarah Vaughan in what was the first bebop orchestra. By the time the strike ended, Eckstine, Parker, Gillespie, and Vaughan were gone, but tenor Wardell Gray was still around to star with the group during 1945-1946.

In 1948, the economic situation forced Hines to break up his orchestra. He joined the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, but three years of playing second fiddle to his old friend were difficult to take. After leaving Armstrong in 1951, Hines moved to Los Angeles and later San Francisco, heading a Dixieland band. Although his style was much more modern, Hines kept the group working throughout the 1950s, at times featuring Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy Archey, and Darnell Howard. Hines did record on a few occasions, but was largely forgotten in the jazz world by the early '60s. Then, in 1964, jazz writer Stanley Dance arranged for him to play three concerts at New York's Little Theater, both solo and in a quartet with Budd Johnson. The New York critics were amazed by Hines' continuing creativity and vitality, and he had a major comeback that lasted through the rest of his career. Hines traveled the world with his quartet, recorded dozens of albums, and remained famous and renowned up until his death at the age of 79. Most of the many recordings from his career are currently available on CD.

from Wikipedia:

Earl Kenneth Hines, universally known as Earl "Fatha" Hines, (December 28, 1903 – April 22, 1983) was an American jazz pianist. Hines was one of the most influential figures in the development of modern jazz piano and, according to one major source, is "one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz".

Biography

Early life

Earl Hines was born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania 12 miles from Pittsburgh city center. His father played cornet and was leader of Pittsburgh's Eureka Brass Band, his stepmother a church organist. Hines intended to follow his father on cornet but "blowing" hurt him behind the ears - while the piano didn't. The young Hines took classical piano lessons - at eleven he was playing organ in his local Baptist church - but he also had a "good ear and a good memory" and could re-play songs and numbers he heard in theaters and park 'concerts': "I'd be playing songs from these shows months before the song copies came out. That astonished a lot of people and they'd ask where I heard these numbers and I'd tell them at the theatre where my parents had taken me." Later Hines was to say that he was playing piano around Pittsburgh "before the word 'jazz' was even invented".

Early career

At the age of 17, and with his father's approval, Hines moved away from home to take a job playing piano with Lois Deppe & his 'Symphonian Serenaders' in the "Liederhaus", a Pittsburgh nightclub. He got 2 meals a day and $15 a week. Deppe was a well-known baritone who sang both classical and popular numbers. Deppe used the young Hines as his accompanist for both and took Hines on his concert-trips to New York. Hines' first recordings were accompanying Deppe — four sides recorded with Gennett Records in 1923. Only two of these were issued, and only one, a Hines composition, "Congaine", "a keen snappy foxtrot", featured any solo work by Hines. Hines entered the studio again with Deppe a month later to record spirituals and popular songs.

In 1925, after much family debate, Hines moved to Chicago, Illinois, then the world's "jazz" capital, home (at the time) to Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. He started in The Elite no 2 Club but soon joined Carroll Dickerson's band with whom he also toured on the Pantages Theatre Circuit to Los Angeles and back.

Then, in the poolroom at Chicago's Musicians' Union on State & 39th, Earl Hines met Louis Armstrong. Hines was 21, Armstrong 24. They played together at the Union piano. Armstrong was astounded by Hines's avant-garde "trumpet-style" piano-playing, often using dazzlingly fast octaves so that on none-too-perfect upright pianos (and with no amplification) "they could hear me out front" - as indeed they could. Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia says:

... [Hines'] most dramatic departure from what other pianists were then playing was his approach to the underlying pulse: he would charge against the metre of the piece being played, accent off-beats, introduce sudden stops and brief silences. In other hands this might sound clumsy or all over the place but Hines could keep his bearings with uncanny resilience.

Armstrong and Hines became good friends, shared a car, and Armstrong joined Hines in Carroll Dickerson's band at the Sunset Cafe. In 1927, this became Louis Armstrong's band under the musical direction of Hines. Later that year, Armstrong revamped his Okeh Records recording-only band, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, and replaced his wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano with Hines. Armstrong and Hines then recorded what are often regarded as some of the most important jazz records ever made, most famously their 1928 trumpet and piano duet "Weatherbird".

... with Earl Hines arriving on piano, Armstrong was already approaching the stature of a concerto soloist, a role he would play more or less throughout the next decade, which makes these final small-group sessions something like a reluctant farewell to jazz's first golden age. Since Hines is also magnificent on these discs (and their insouciant exuberance is a marvel on the duet showstopper "Weather Bird") the results seem like eavesdropping on great men speaking almost quietly among themselves. There is nothing in jazz finer or more moving than the playing on "West End Blues", "Tight Like This", "Beau Koo Jack" & "Muggles".

The Sunset Cafe closed in 1927. Hines, Armstrong and their drummer, Zutty Singleton, agreed they would be, “'The Unholy Three', stick together and not play for anyone unless the three of us were hired” but, trying to establish their own Warwick Hall Club as 'Louis Armstrong and his Stompers' [with Hines as musical director and the premises rented in Hines' name] they ran into difficulties. Hines went briefly to New York to return to find that in his absence Armstrong and Singleton had re-joined their now-rival Carroll Dickerson’s band at the new The Savoy Ballroom – a fact which left Hines “warm”. Hines joined clarinetist Jimmy Noone at The Apex, an after-hours speakeasy, playing from midnight – 6am 7 nights a week. Hines recorded with Noone, again with Armstrong and late in 1928 recorded his first piano solos, 8 for QRS Records in New York then 7 for Okeh Records in Chicago, all except two his own compositions. He moved in with Kathryn Perry with whom he had recorded 'Sadie Green The Vamp of New Orleans' but Hines had also begun rehearsing his own big-band. At 24 his big break was about to come.

Chicago years

On 28 December 1928 (so on his 25th birthday and 6 weeks before The Saint Valentine's Day massacre) the always-immaculate Hines opened at Chicago's Grand Terrace Cafe leading his own big-band, the pinnacle of jazz ambition at the time. "All America was dancing", Hines said and for the next 12 years and through the worst of the Great Depression and Prohibition Earl Hines was "The Orchestra" in The Grand Terrace. The Hines Orchestra [or 'Organization' as Hines preferred it - it had up to 28 musicians] did three shows a night in The Grand Terrace, four shows every Saturday and sometimes did Sundays. "Earl Hines and The Grand Terrace were to Chicago what Duke Ellington and The Cotton Club were to New York - but fierier."

The Grand Terrace was controlled by Al Capone - so Hines became Capone's "Mr Piano Man" with the Grand Terrace upright piano soon replaced by a white $3,000 Bechstein grand. Talking about those days Hines later said:

... Al [Capone] came in there one night and called the whole band and show together and said, “Now we want to let you know our position. We just want you people just to attend to your own business. We’ll give you all the Protection in the world but we want you to be like the 3 monkeys: you hear nothing and you see nothing and you say nothing”. And that’s what we did. I used to hear many of the things that they were going to do but I never did tell anyone. Sometimes the Police used to come in ... looking for a fall guy and say, “Earl what were they talking about?” ... but I said, “I don’t know - no, you’re not going to pin that on me”, because they had a habit of putting the pictures of different people that would bring information in the newspaper and the next day you would find them out there in the lake somewhere swimming around with some chains attached to their feet if you know what I mean …

From The Grand Terrace, Hines and his band broadcast on "open mikes" over many years, sometimes seven nights a week, coast-to-coast across America — Chicago being well placed to deal with the U.S. live-broadcasting time-zone problem. Earl Hines' became the most broadcast band in America. Among his listeners were a young Nat 'King' Cole and Jay McShann in Kansas City who said his "...real education came from Earl Hines. When 'Fatha' went off the air, I went to bed”. But Hines' most notable 'student' was Art Tatum from Toledo, Ohio, 6 years younger than Hines and now often regarded as the greatest pianist jazz has so far produced.

Hines always liked to promote and, often surprisingly quietly, to accompany singers most notably, in the Grand Terrace days, Billy Eckstine:

... on tour, Hines and his star singer Billy Eckstine were treated like the rock stars of later years, being mobbed by the huge crowds that turned out to hear them.

Each summer, Hines toured his whole band for three months, including through the South. "When we traveled by train through the South, they would send a porter back to our car to let us know when the dining room was cleared, and then we would all go in together. We couldn't eat when we wanted to. We had to eat when they were ready for us."

Occasionally, Hines allowed other pianists to play as 'relief' piano player which better allowed Hines to conduct his whole 'Organization'. Jess Stacy was one, Nat "King" Cole and Teddy Wilson were others (though Cliff Smalls was his favorite). The Hines band also included noteworthy reed players: Omer Simeon, Jimmy Mundy and Budd Johnson. Mundy, with Hines from 1932 to 1936, also did arranging work for Hines before he left for Benny Goodman's orchestra. Johnson (along with Billy Eckstine) has been credited with helping to bring modern players into the Hines band in the transition between swing and bebop. And it was with Hines in The Grand Terrace that Charlie Parker got his first professional job until he was fired for his "time-keeping" — by which Hines meant Parker's inability to show up on time despite Parker resorting to sleeping under The Grand Terrace stage in his attempts to do so.

The Birth of Bebop

The Grand Terrace closed suddenly in December 1940 with the manager, Ed Fox, 'not to be found'. Hines, always famously good to work for, took his band on the road. Some of his band members were drafted to fight in World War ll but Hines toured his band coast to coast across America taking time out to front the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1944 while Duke was ill. (Thirty years later, Hines's 20 solo "transformative versions" of his Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington recorded in the 1970s were described by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times as "as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there".)

It was during this time (and especially during the 1942–44 musicians' strike recording ban) that members of the Hines' band's late-night jam-sessions laid the seeds for the upcoming 'revolution' in jazz, Bebop. Duke Ellington was later to say that, "the seeds of bop were in Earl Hines's piano style" while Charlie Parker's biographer wrote:

... The Earl Hines Orchestra of 1942 had been infiltrated by the jazz revolutionaries. Each section had its cell of insurgents. The band’s sonority bristled with flatted fifths, off triplets and other material of the new sound scheme. Fellow bandleaders of a more conservative bent warned Hines that he had recruited much too well and was sitting on a powder keg.

Composer Gunther Schuller said:

... In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work. Two years later I read that that was 'bop' and the beginning of modern jazz ... but the band never made recordings.

Dizzie Gillespie wrote of that band:

... We had a beautiful, beautiful band with Earl Hines. He’s a master and you learn a lot from him, self-discipline and organization. Earl Hines was the pianist in his band and I mean he played some piano. We used to make him play longer solos. We’d say, “Play another one, Gates”. And he’d go again. They’d say, “Lay out, lay out, lay out …” and we wouldn’t come in. Earl had to play again. He’d look up and keep playing and grinning. You couldn’t flush him … no matter what you did. We wouldn’t come in when we were supposed to and make him play another chorus. He’d be sweating, man, but he’s so cool, he's the epitome of perfection. Earl Hines is the master of composure. He is class personified. I don’t know a classier musician or a classier person in any field than Earl Hines”

In 1946 Hines received serious head injuries in a car crash near Houston which affected his eyesight but he continued to lead his big-band for 2 more years. In 1947 he bought the El Grotto nightclub in Chicago - the showgirls were called The Grottoettes - but it soon foundered, Hines losing $30,000. In reality the big-band era was over - Hines had had his for 20 years.

Rediscovery

In early 1948, Hines joined up again with Armstrong in the "Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars" 'small-band' (rather, Hines now came to feel, as a sideman) and stayed, not entirely happily, thru' 1951. Next, back as leader again, Hines took his own small combos around the States and Europe but, at the start of the jazz-lean 1960s and old enough now to retire and take up bowling, Hines settled "home" in Oakland, California with his wife and two young daughters, Janear and Tosca, opened a tobacconist's and came close to giving up the profession.

Then, in 1964, thanks to Stanley Dance, Earl Hines' determined friend and unofficial manager, Hines was "suddenly rediscovered" following a series of 'recitals' at The Little Theatre in New York that Dance had cajoled him into. They were the first piano 'recitals' Hines - always thinking of himself as "just a band pianist" - had ever given. These 'recitals' caused a sensation. "What is there left to hear after you've heard Earl Hines?", asked the New York Times. Hines then won the 1966 "International Critics Poll" for Down Beat Magazine's "Hall of Fame". Down Beat also elected him the world's "No 1 Jazz Pianist" in 1966 (and were to do so again five further times). Jazz Journal awarded his LP's of the year first and second in their overall poll and first, second and third in their piano category. Jazz voted him "Jazzman of the Year", voted him their no. 1 and no. 2 in their piano recordings category and he was on Johnny Carson's and Mike Douglas' TV shows.

From then until he died twenty years later Hines recorded endlessly both solo and with jazz notables like Cat Anderson, Harold Ashby, Barney Bigard, Lawrence Brown, Dave Brubeck (they recorded duets in 1975), Jaki Byard (duets in 1972), Benny Carter, Buck Clayton, Cozy Cole, Wallace Davenport, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Vic Dickenson, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington (duets in 1966), Ella Fitzgerald, Panama Francis, Bud Freeman, Stan Getz, Dizzie Gillespie, Paul Gonsalves, Stephane Grappelli, Sonny Greer, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Peanuts Hucko, Helen Humes, Budd Johnson, Jonah Jones, Max Kaminsky, Gene Krupa, Ellis Larkins, Marian McPartland (duets in 1970), Gerry Mulligan, Ray Nance, Oscar Peterson (duets in 1968), Russell Procope, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Rushing, Stuff Smith, Rex Stewart, Maxine Sullivan, Buddy Tate, Jack Teagarden, Clark Terry, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Venuti, Earle Warren, Ben Webster, Teddy Wilson (duets in 1965 & 1970), Jimmy Witherspoon, Jimmy Woode and Lester Young. Possibly more surprising were Alvin Batiste, Art Blakey, Teresa Brewer, Richard Davis, Elvin Jones, Etta Jones, The Inkspots, Peggy Lee, Helen Merrill, Charles Mingus, Vi Redd, Betty Roché, Caterina Valente, Dinah Washington—and "Ditty Wah Ditty" with Ry Cooder. But his most acclaimed recordings of this period were his solo performances, "a whole orchestra by himself". Whitney Balliett wrote of his solo recordings and performances of this time:

... Hines will be sixty-seven this year and his style has become involuted, rococo, and subtle to the point of elusiveness. It unfolds in orchestral layers and it demands intense listening. Despite the sheer mass of notes he now uses, his playing is never fatty. Hines may go along like this in a medium tempo blues. He will play the first two choruses softly and out of tempo, unreeling placid chords that safely hold the kernel of the melody. By the third chorus, he will have slid into a steady but implied beat and raised his volume. Then, using steady tenths in his left hand, he will stamp out a whole chorus of right-hand chords in between beats. He will vault into the upper register in the next chorus and wind through irregularly placed notes, while his left hand plays descending, on-the-beat, chords that pass through a forest of harmonic changes. (There are so many push-me, pull-you contrasts going on in such a chorus that it is impossible to grasp it one time through.) In the next chorus—bang!—up goes the volume again and Hines breaks into a crazy-legged double-time-and-a-half run that may make several sweeps up and down the keyboard and that are punctuated by offbeat single notes in the left hand. Then he will throw in several fast descending two-fingered glissandos, go abruptly into an arrhythmic swirl of chords and short, broken, runs and, as abruptly as he began it all, ease into an interlude of relaxed chords and poling single notes. But these choruses, which may be followed by eight or ten more before Hines has finished what he has to say, are irresistible in other ways. Each is a complete creation in itself, and yet each is lashed tightly to the next. Hines' sudden changes in dynamics, tempo, and texture are dramatic but not melodramatic; the ham lurking in the middle distance never gets any closer. And Hines is a perfervid pianist; he gives the impression that he has shut himself up completely within his instrument, that he is issuing chords and runs and glisses not merely through its keyboard and hammers and strings but directly from its soul.

Solo tributes to Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter were all put on record in the 1970s, sometimes on the 1904 12-legged Steinway (unique and famously ornate) given to him in 1969 by Scott Newhall, managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1974, so now in his seventies, Hines recorded sixteen LPs. "A spate of solo recording meant that, in his old age, Hines was being comprehensively documented at last, and he rose to the challenge with consistent inspirational force". Between his 1964 "come-back" and up to when he died, Hines recorded over 100 LPs all over the world. Within the industry, he became legendary for going into a studio and coming out an hour-and-a-half later with a famously-unplanned 'solo' LP behind him including discussion and coffee time - and ideally a brandy or two. Retakes were almost unheard of except when Hines wanted to try a tune again in some, often completely, "other way".

Pianist Lennie Tristano said of these recordings, "Earl Hines is the ONLY one of us capable of creating real jazz and real swing when playing all alone." To Horace Silver, "He has a completely unique style. No one can get that sound, no other pianist". Erroll Garner said, "When you talk about greatness, you talk about Art Tatum and Earl Hines". To Count Basie, Hines was "The greatest piano player in the world".

From 1964 on Hines often toured Europe (especially France), toured South America in 1968 and added Asia, Australia, Japan and, in 1966, the Soviet Union to his list of State Department-funded destinations. (During his 6-week Soviet Union tour, the 10,000-seat Kiev Sports Palace was sold out. As a result, the Kremlin canceled his Moscow and Leningrad concerts ("Reds Change Hines Tour") as being "too culturally dangerous".)

Final years

Arguably still playing as well as he ever had, Hines displayed individualistic quirks (including grunts a la' Glenn Gould ) in these performances. Now, he sometimes sang as he played, especially his own "They Didn't Believe I Could Do It—Neither Did I". In 1975, Hines made an hour-long "solo" film for British TV out-of-hours in Blues Alley, a Washington nightclub: the "New York Herald Tribune" described it as "The greatest jazz film ever made". In that film Hines said, '"The way I like to play is that ... I'm an explorer, if I might use that expression, I'm looking for something all the time ... almost like I'm trying to talk".

He played solo in The White House (twice) and played solo for The Pope - and played (and sang) his last show in San Francisco a few days before he died in Oakland, quite likely somewhat older than he had always maintained. As he had wished, his Steinway had a very much "All Star" Christie's auction for the benefit of gifted low-income music students, still bearing its silver plaque: "presented by jazz lovers from all over the world. this piano is the only one of its kind in the world and expresses the great genius of a man who has never played a melancholy note in his lifetime on a planet that has often succumbed to despair".

On his tombstone is the inscription: "piano man".

Selected discography

[It would seem that Hines' first-ever recording was on 3 October 1923.]

Up until 1948 - and therefore including Big Band era:

Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines: inc.'Weatherbird','Muggles','Tight Like This','West End Blues' : Columbia 1928: reissued many times inc. as The Smithsonian Collection MLP 2012Jimmie Noone & Earl Hines: "At the Apex Club": Decca 1928: reissuedEarl Hines Solo: 14 of his own compositions: QRS & OKeh: 1928/9: reissued many times[see below]Earl Hines Collection: Piano Solos 1928-40: OKeh/Brunswick/Bluebird: Collectors ClassicsThat's a Plenty, Quadromania series 1928-1947 Membran 4 CDs 2006Deep Forest, HEP ca. 1932-1933,Earl Hines - South Side Swing 1934-1935: DeccaThe Indispensable Earl Hines: Vols 1, 2, 3 & 4 [also 5 & 6 @ later dates] Jazz Tribune/BMG 1939-1945Earl Hines & The Duke's Men: [with Ellington side-men] 1944: reissued Delmark 1994Earl Hines & His Grand Terrace Orchestra: 'Piano Man' etc. 1939-1945: RCA Bluebird: reissued many timesEarl Fatha Hines and His Orchestra: 1945-1951, Limelight 15 766

[Big bands were particularly affected by the 1942-1944 American Federation of Musicians recording ban which also curtailed the recording of early bebop]

After 1948 - and therefore after Big Band era:

Louis Armstrong All Stars: Live in Zurich 18 October 1949: Montreux Jazz LabelLouis Armstrong & The All Stars: Decca 1950 & 1951: reissuedEarl Hines: Paris One Night Stand: Verve/Emarcy France 1957The Real Earl Hines: [1st 'Rediscovery' concert @ Little Theatre NY 1964] Focus & Collectibles Jazz Classics: reissuedEarl Hines: The Legendary Little Theatre Concert [2nd 'Rediscovery' concert]: Muse 1964Earl Hines: Blues in Thirds: solo: Black Lion 1965Earl Hines: '65 Solo - The Definitive Black & Blue Sessions: Black & Blue 1965Earl Hines: Fatha's Hands - Americans Swinging in Paris EMI 1965Earl Hines: Hine's Tune: [live in France with Ben Webster, Don Byas, Roy Eldridge, Stuff Smith, Jimmy Woode & Kenny Clarke]: Wotre Music/Esoldun 1965: reissuedOnce Upon a Time [with Ellington side-men]: Verve 1966Jazz from a Swinging Era [with All-Star group in Paris]: Fontana 1967Earl Hines: At Home: solo: [on his own Steinway]: Delmark 1969Earl Hines: My Tribute to Louis: solo: Audiophile 1971 [recorded 2 weeks after Armstrong's death]Earl Hines plays Duke Ellington: vols 1 & 2: solo: New World 1971-1975Earl Hines: Hines plays Hines: The Australian Sessions: solo: Swaggie 1972Earl Hines: Tour de Force & Tour de Force Encore: solo: Black Lion 1972Earl Hines: Live at the New School: solo: Chiarascuro 1973Earl Hines: A Monday Date: reissues of Hines' 15 1928/1929 QRS & OKEH solo recordings: Milestone 1973Earl Hines: The Quintessential Recording Session: solo: Chiaroscuro 1973 [remakes of his 8 1928 solo QRS piano recordings]Earl Hines: The Quintessential Continued: solo: Chiaroscuro 1973 [remakes of his 7 1928/9 solo OKEH piano recordings]Earl Hines/Stephane Grappelli duets, The Giants: Black Lion Records 1974Earl Hines/Joe Venuti duets: Hot Sonatas: Chiaroscuro 1975Earl 'Fatha' Hines: The Father of Modern Jazz Piano: solo [on Schiedmeyer grand] and with Budd Johnson, Bill Pemberton, Oliver Jackson: MF Productions 1977Earl Hines: In New Orleans: solo: Chiarascuro 1977An Evening With Earl Hines: with Tiny Grimes, Hank Young, Bert Dahlander and Marva Josie: Vogue VDJ-534, 1977Earl 'Fatha' Hines plays Hits he Missed: [inc Monk, Zawinul, Silver]: Direct to Disc M & K RealTime 1978

[It would seem that Hines' last-ever recording was on 29 December 1981.]

On anthologies:

The Complete Master Jazz Piano Series: 13 Hines solo numbers: MD4 140 [with Jay McShann, Teddy Wilson, Cliff Smalls etc.] 1969-1972